Grief and Gratitude

“What are you feeling?”

“Anger.”

Heat blooms in the center of my chest, floods to the tips of my fingers, as I remember sitting at a long table in a nameless room on the top floor of a courthouse listening to a mad interpretation of my character, my motives, my life. For eight hours each day they goaded me with their version of events and who I was, daring me all the while to lash to, to protest, even to just break the calm expression frozen onto my face. I hid mala beads in the right front pocket of my suit pants pocket for just this purpose. I feel each one with tips of my fingers, try to connect my feet to the floor thru my boots. Every one of their accusations is a confession, I remind myself endlessly, a thin mantra with which I anchor my ragged calm.

An expert I have never met nor even spoken to is on a large TV mounted to the wall. The people sitting across the table from me hired him to as a supposed neutral expert to review the results of a 6-month investigation that had not gone well for them. Unable to address the facts of the report head-on, he has instead chosen to come after me in an attempt to earn his commission. He concludes simultaneously that I am an absent father, who is also a helicopter parent. He notices his accidental contradiction, stumbles, loses his train of thought, gets flustered. Still, my expression remains flat. I wiggle my toes in my boots and map my breaths instead: four seconds in, hold, eight seconds out, hold. I remember that cross examination is coming, and later, too, our turn to speak.

“No, the anger is only a manifestation. What lies deeper?”

I hesitate, looking down. My palms lie open in my lap, facing back up toward me.

“Shame,” I whisper.

I have been living in a hotel just off the I-95 for nearly a year, consumed with a project that I ardently pray will either cure me or swallow me whole. Seven days a week I run crews to transform a common deck barge into something a rocket can land on. Seven nights a week I sit at the hotel bar. I order in food from one of the restaurants perched like islands in the endless expanse of asphalt surrounding the hotel. I eat out of Styrofoam containers with plastic utensils, wash it all down with a few beers.

I bullshit with my crew, tell rocket tall tales to impress the local bar flies, and flirt with the bartender. I left home and ran to this job to escape a failing marriage strained by two years of building launch pads and the hard reality that college sweethearts rarely stay sweet once the excitement of the early years gives way to the monotony of normal life. Picking grad schools, driving across the country, finding work, and casting visions of a future are much different than actually living the reality day to day.

The bar winds down around 1:00 AM, and everyone staggers off to their rooms. I have to be to work at 6:00, but I don’t go to sleep. Around 2:00, I hear the soft knock at the door that comes almost every night. I open it, without looking at me or saying a word the bartender walks in and shuts the door behind her.

“Yes, shame is there,” Mike acknowledges, “But there’s more. Drop in deeper.”

I rock uneasily on my chair, trying to ground through my sits bones. I push my toes into the carpet and curl them repeatedly, gripping then releasing small tufts. I try to take a cleansing breath, but it’s ragged and catches in my chest. A single sob tries to escape. I choke it back.

“I don’t know. I can’t name it. I don’t know what this is,” I manage to spit out.

“It’s grief,” he says.

“What the fuck am I supposed to do with it?” I cry as I feel the rising flames touch me like wildfire, a kind of wide-eyed animal panic taking hold.

“Sit with it. Feel it. For once.”

I quit the job. I go to Scotland with my mom and brother to try to get my head right, to understand where some semblance of self and purpose might come from if not from work. I’m not sure. I fly across the country, pull my things out of storage, throw them into a U-Haul, and point it north for Alaska. After one last visit, I end things with the bartender. Months go by, my first winter home arrives. I am celebrating Christmas with childhood friends when my phone rings. I step outside and answer. I notice it’s snowing. It’s her. She’s crying. Through the sobs I hear one thing only, “I’m pregnant.” It’s silent, save for the crisp kiss of wet flakes as they fall on my shoulders.

Slowly, I begin to face reality: I am not the man I want to be, certainly not the one I want my child to know. I wore a prestigious job like armor with nothing underneath. I start a business to make a little money. I rent an apartment and furnish it with a Sam’s Club credit card that promises 0% APR. I use it to buy more than plates, utensils, couches, a bed, a crib, and food. I use it to buy time. Everything is strained, money, relations with the mother-to-be, and even my lower back from the unyielding terror.

The months march by, spring then summer come. I am in the delivery room, and I watch her come into the world. I catch her. She is here! — but something isn’t right. Her face is dusky and blue. She has a nuchal cord; the umbilical is wrapped around her neck. The universe stops turning. The doctor moves fast, taking her from me, running scissors neatly along her neck to sever the cord. She hesitates, sucks in a short breath and lets out a war cry scream declaring her arrival and intention to remain that’s so loud I’m afraid the doctor might drop her.

A fierce pride, like a primal inferno, ignites in my heart and thrums through my being. A switch flips somewhere deep inside. My heart is a compass, and she is true north. She is all that matters, the single star in an otherwise barren night sky that I will forever steer toward. Tears stream from my eyes like rivers in a mix of relief, love, and joy I didn’t think possible. She is here, she is staying.

“Good,” my guide says, “If you can do that every day, till and work this fertile ground, something new will begin to grow.”

I think of the eight years and two weeks we have had since that day. Quiet moments of discovery as I followed her around the house on all fours, letting her lead, as we discovered the coffee table drawers, the kitchen cabinets, and the sound of the cool, hard floor slapping under our palms as we crawled along.

Wild hours just a few years later pretending to be wolves looking for our pack as I pushed her on a kicksled along a frozen trail under the full moon on a crisp December night.

Challenging times when we were apart, as I put on a variety show night after night, bit after bit, game after game, in an attempt to keep her toddler attention on FaceTime for even ten minutes.

Times of growth as I ran up and down the road for hours on end pushing her bike, helping her believe she could balance, catching her before she tumbled, and cheering so loud when she took off on her own at top speed that she almost crashed from embarrassment.

Moments of shared pride as she walked up to me just before her fifth birthday, said, “watch this,” with all her cool girl attitude and read her favorite picture books cover to cover.

Quiet moments of shared sorrow as we say goodbye, trading bracelets with our names beaded in them, looking forward always to the next time we say hello.

Watching those eight years go by in a flash, trying to take no moment for granted.

I already know what grows if I have the courage to continue to be present, to work the earth of my grief.

Gratitude.